My hands

Okay, I gotta say this, and I'm not ashamed to admit it. I work in an office. I sit behind a desk all day. My hands aren't really subjected to much abuse, other than the looming threat of carpal tunnel syndrome from typing all day.

Occasionally, we need to get out in the field to log water wells. Typically we will drop a reel of measuring tape down a well, sometimes as deep as 1500 feet. To extract the tape back up, we have to manually pull it up. Lifting 1500 feet of tape isn't as easy as it sounds. For one, all of the tape, plus the equipment attached to the bottom, weighs about 30 pounds at the very bottom, Imagine, one foot of tape might only weigh a few ounces, but multiply a few ounces by 1500 feet and you get.... well, you get something pretty heavy!! Plus there's an $8000 probe at the bottom of it that weighs about 8 or 9 pounds.

The second problem is that since the tape goes into water, the tape is slippery. And there are rocks all over the tape from where it hits the sides of the open hole portion of the well. So basically you are gripping REALLY hard to not let it slip, but gripping the little rocks as well.

Now, being that I'm a guitar player, I really try to take care of my fingers. Having said that, ten years ago I almost sliced off my fingertip with a cleaver (that was the last time I used a cleaver), but that's another story for another time.

Anyway, after a day of pulling tape (it's really only about 30 minutes of pulling that you're doing in one day), here's what my hands looked like: